Gilding , inlay and the mobility of metallurgy : A case of fraud in medieval Kashmir

The rise of an inlaid metalwork industry in Khurasan, eastern Iran, during the second half of the twelfth century constitutes one of the canonical subjects of Islamic art history. The spectacular candlesticks, ewers and pen-boxes that form the most common products of the Khurasani metalwork industry are among the objects of Islamic art most familiar to any museumgoer in Europe or the United States. While the Hermitage pen-box (qalamdan) dated 542/1148 gives us a terminus ad quem for the use of the technique in Khurasan, the most spectacular example of the genre, the cast bronze vessel of 559/1163 known as the Bobrinski bucket, localises the phenomenon by naming its own place of production as the Khurasani city of Herat, now in western Afghanistan.1 The industry seems therefore to have flourished in the western territories of the Ghurid sultans. The Ghurids were parvenus from the mountains of central Afghanistan who, for a few brief decades at the end of the twelfth century, ruled over a vast swathe of territory extending across the modern states of Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and India. The remarkable transregional polity that they created was ephemeral, collapsing in the face of external pressures and internal struggles over succession around 1210.2 Nevertheless, its legacy left an enduring impression upon the cultural and political life of the eastern Islamic world, witnessed on the one hand by the emergence of the Delhi sultanate, and on the other by the apparent westward migration of certain elements in the repertoire of the Herati metalworkers (most obviously animated scripts), which appear in the inlaid brass vessels produced in northern Iraq and Syria in the first half of the thirteenth century.3 5